Mud Buttes
and Neutral Hills

Mud Buttes is a group of low hills 15 kilometres south of the hamlet of Monitor, east of Coronation. It is an isolated pocket of badlands about two kilometres long and 800 metres wide, and is probably North America's largest and best exposed site of glacially deformed bedrock. The folds and faults here are formed by the push from advancing glaciers, and provide excellent information about the direction of flow of glaciers during the last Ice Age.

The rocks forming Mud Buttes are weakly cemented sandstones and mudstones deposited around 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period. These soft rocks were bulldozed into faults and rounded, toothpaste-like folds by the immense weight of an overriding glacier.

The advancing glacier tore loose large sheets of bedrock and shoved them 5 kilometres to the southwest, stacking them against each other to produce Mud Buttes. Measurements of the folds and faults, plus the presence of igneous and metamorphic rocks in nearby glacial sediment indicates that the glacier advanced from as far away as the Canadian Shield. That's at least 700 kilometres!